Recent progress in continuous-wave Ti:sapphire waveguide lasers

Abstract

A detailed study of the fabrication and continuous-wave laser operation of Ti:sapphire channel waveguides written with femtosecond (fs) and picosecond (ps) laser pulses in the bulk of a Ti:sapphire crystal is presented. The waveguides were produced using the double-line approach and the effect of parameters such as the laser pulse duration, repetition rate and interline spacing were investigated for optimizing the laser operation. Structures fabricated by fs-laser pulses (180 fs) exhibited superior performance delivering output powers up 143 mW with a slope efficiency of 23.5% and producing laser emission above a threshold of 84 mW. The emission wavelength was tuned over a wavelength range spanning from 700 to 920 nm using cavity optics with broadband transmission at the lasing wavelength in combination with a birefringent filter in an external cavity. © 2014 SPIE.